Study Finds Beautiful Women Face Job Discrimination

It is so hard to be a pretty woman in America, a new study suggests. Pretty women can’t keep jobs if they’re too pretty, as we all learned during the Debrahlee Lorenzana saga in June. And this study, released by the University of Colorado Denver, suggests attractive ladies can’t even get jobs!

The study involved “giving participants a list of jobs and photos of applicants and asking them to sort them according to their suitability for the role,” which is exactly how hiring decisions are made in real life. According to the report, beautiful women were passed over for jobs including “manager of research and development, director of finance, mechanical engineer and construction supervisor.” As if that weren’t bad enough, the pretty women also weren’t selected to be hardware salespeople, prison guards, or tow-truck drivers!We immediately called to mind some counterexamples: what about models, actresses, bottle-service waitresses, flight attendants, real-estate agents, television news personalities, and VF Daily bloggers, all of whom tend to be attractive? Turns out the discrimination only applies to “masculine” jobs, “where appearance was not seen as important.”

“In every other kind of job, attractive women were preferred,” one of the researchers said; and Reuters reminds us that good-looking people tend to get “higher salaries, better performance evaluations, higher levels of admission to college, better voter ratings when running for public office, and more favorable judgments in trials.” Ah, yes—that sounds right.